SoundBlaster 16 settings for VirtualPC & Qemu

Granted for Qemu I manually add in the Adlib card (why isn’t it there??) but for MS-DOS you almost always have to set the BLASTER environment variable… And I always forget what it is…

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T5

Which translates to an IO base of 0x220, IRQ 5, DMA 1 and High DMA 5. Because it has a high DMA channel, it is a Sound Blaster 16, and specified by T5. If you want to play MS-DOS games in Qemu, be sure to compile in the adlib..

6 thoughts on “SoundBlaster 16 settings for VirtualPC & Qemu”

DOS games are actually very inconsistent. Some require the BLASTER variable and won’t even look for a Sound Blaster otherwise. Others ignore the environment variable and detect the hardware fully on their own.

And the P330 means that a (more or less) MPU-401 compatible hardware is at I/O port 330. Not sure if qemu actually emulates that.

I think that is the AdLib… it’s optional in the configuration for some reason, it works perfectly fine… I always end up building my own Win32 exe’s of Qemu so I can “enjoy” some fine MIDI action of the late 1980’s and 1990’s….

Continuing in the fine tradition if iD’s software’s lacking sound support… After the DOOM fallout its no surprise they did their own thing, and in the age of Windows and hardware abstraction at least we don’t have to deal with it either…

Odd for better or worse there never was any good/free abstraction stuff for MS-DOS…..

I recall one that was in a book about writing dos games or doom like games (it was terrible, but it had a great explanation of RLE files (PCX!)), but of course it was 16-bit only and I didn’t even have a decent 16bit dos extender back then so doing anything ‘big’ was impossible….

I somehow suspect that audio support on Linux is still … just as bad as it was in 1993.